What is the Marxist stand on automation? To enhance production and continue to unleash the productive forces, automation is required. But again that brings unemployment. Then what is the way out? Sarbratik Brahma, Kolkata IT is important to locate the issue of automation within the larger context of technology itself. Technology has two aspects, one is amplifying human “power” – both physical and mental – the second transferring human “skills” to tools or machines. Technology multiplies human power, for example, adding water power or steam power as motive force that drives equipment. Computers amplify human intelligence, solving bigger problems, and faster than we can solve. Transferring human knowledge and skills to machines is seen as “automation”. It is the combination of adding motive power and transferring human skills to textile machinery that led to the industrial revolution. The combination of spinning jenny and spinning frame – first water powered, and then steam powered – increased the productivity of workers manifold, created the textile mills of Lancashire, and powered the industrial revolution. Of course, this led to large scale protests by self-employed weavers – the Luddites – who were thrown out of their occupation by the newly developed power mills. Apart from destroying the weaving community in England, it also led to the de-industrialisation in India, destroying the weavers in India in towns such as Agra, Dhaka, etc. Marx writes vividly about this (Capital Vol I, Chapter 15), quoting the governor general's report, “The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India." The key reason why the development of technology differs under capitalism is that till then, the tools, one of the key elements in the means of production, were either partly or wholly owned by the artisans. For the peasantry, while the land could be owned by the feudal lords, they still owned the ploughs, the animals required for ploughing, and other agricultural implements. This meant that any technological development that helped increase production, also helped the artisan or the peasantry. This changes under capitalism. Here workers are alienated from their tools, which are now owned by the capitalist class. Therefore, any increase in productivity, such as adding motive power and automation, meant requiring lower number of workers and/or deskilling of the labour force. This went hand in hand with increased production. It is not technology or automation that was the enemy, but capital that consciously used such advances against the workers. Marx writes, “The instrument of labour strikes down the labourer.” Marx in Capital, talks about the initial resistance of the artisans and the workers to the machines, before they understood that it is not the machines that they need to fight, but capitalism itself. He also shows that while it is little consolation to the people whose lives are destroyed in the industrial revolution, it did lead to an enormous expansion of production and employment in other industries. He notes that those who are thrown out of their existing occupation, also gravitate to becoming domestic servants – which he terms as near slavery – the first major “service” sector. Today, the problems associated with automation have become even worse. We have highly automated factories, where the number of workers are very low. The destruction of artisanal sectors and the squeeze on agriculture is not accompanied by a rise in industrial employment. We have huge numbers of young people entering the job market with no hope of securing any worthwhile employment. In India, the service sector providing middle class employment has grown through outsourcing – call centres and software – but again nothing compared to the magnitude of employment that needs to be created. This has seen a huge growth of the casualisation of labour – transient and low paid jobs in the construction industry in the developing countries and McDonald kind of employment in the developed ones. It has led to a huge increase in providing services, autos, taxis, street vendors or what are called the self-employed. Some have started calling this section the precariat, as it never has permanent employment, any social security and is a floating reserve army of labour with little hope for the future. Even here, things are looking bleak. Automation or the use of machine intelligence today is going far beyond the factory floor. Driverless cars, robots and computers can take over a whole range of tasks – from white collar work to work in McDonalds, threatening new sectors and attacking even the precarious employment that McDonalds type of industry provides. The white collar workforce now faces the same challenge that the artisanal workforce faced at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The difference from the earlier industrial revolution and today is that replacing human beings with machines, the only way that technology development plays out under capitalism, is forcing the bulk of humanity under precarious employment conditions. We are facing a future, where conditions will be similar to that of early industrial capitalism, where workers faced an ever rising intensity of exploitation of their labour power, casualisation of labour and mass unemployment. The failure of the Luddite movement shows us that we have to seek a different solution to that of fighting the machines. We need to understand that technology and automation have the potential of increasing production, while simultaneously increasing our leisure. Instead of creating lifestyle goods for a small elite, it has the potential of meeting everybody's needs. That means – fighting capitalism that sets the machine against human beings, not the machine itself. Of course, for the trade union in the factory floor, it will have to defend against retrenchment, increasing of work load, etc, but it will have to build a consciousness in the working class that it is the overthrow of capitalism that can solve the larger problem that sets the machine against human beings. We also need to create an alternate trajectory of development instead of the big capital led jobless growth model that we are following. We need different kind of automation technologies that help big and small industries to be globally competitive, while not creating large scale displacement of labour. It means not inviting foreign capital under the vacuous slogan of “Make in India” but developing our technology, and knowledge systems that can not only provide competitive goods, but also create employment. That would need a battle of all the working people of this country including the knowledge workers, against capital, and fighting the extreme form of predatory capitalism that we are witnessing today. It means liberating not only the knowledge workers but also knowledge itself from capital.